Wednesday, August 12, 2009

A world, a part

This might become a habit. My third post this week - a new record! I promise I'll keep this brief, so as not to use up an unnecessarily large share of bandwidth with my nonsense.

Rather than return to my normal, tried-and-true method of part extraction (the same method that I've used since Finale 95), I chose to shake things up a bit with this new orchestra piece that I am wrapping up. I dove into the brave new world of linked parts. And you know what - they worked FAR better than I could have imagined. Granted, I had to relearn quite a few things, including not only how to set up preferences for the linked parts, but also what adjustments I had to make to my actual score so that the two "beasts" played nice with one another (Sibelius' ability to create "blank pages," as opposed to "music pages," suddenly became a huge factor in how this all played out).

The end result is that all of my parts are, well, perfect. Very little adjusting needed. Cues are all nice and embedded into my score (thanks to the "Paste as Cue" command - another great feature!), and show up perfectly in my parts. All in all, a great first experience.

I just thought I would share this with anyone who has yet to try linked parts in Sibelius. Fear not this strange new world - go for it!

1 comment:

Linked parts are great! Especially in Sib. 6 with magnetic layout. My problem is that magnetic layout makes the initial parts look so good it's easy to forget to edit them as well as you should, as there are still minor niggles that need adressing.

Were you able to print all your parts from the initial file you composed the score in? I usually find myself saving a copy of my score and using that to work on the parts. Big house style changes, adding pages, and major format stuff can make it difficult work on them in the same file.

It comes out to be about the same as extracting, except batch processing is easier. It sounds like your luck was better. Sibelius does a pretty good job letting you seperating formatting paramters between scores and parts.

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Kenneth Froelich's Music

Who am I?

Kenneth currently lives in Fresno, CA with his wife Jennifer and daughter Katerina, where he is appointed as Assistant Professor in Music Composition at California State University, Fresno. His music has been performed by many world renowned performing ensembles, including the American Composers Orchestra, Duo46, Earplay, the Empyrean Ensemble, the California EAR Unit, the Jolles Duo, and the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, among others. Kenneth has received several national awards and recognitions for his compositions from ASCAP, the National Association of Composers/USA, Meet the Composer, the California Association of Professional Music Teachers (in conjunction with MTNA), the Percussive Arts Society, the New York Youth Symphony, the Society of Composers, Inc., IDEAS (Interactive Digital Environments Arts and Storytelling), and others. Works of his have been performed internationally in Germany, Italy, China, Chile, Argentina, Peru, and Finland. Kenneth’s percussion ensemble work “Accidental Migration” is available through C. Alan Publications. Additional music is available at JOMAR Press, or by contacting Kenneth directly at kfroelich@csufresno.edu.